Anonymous

[The Winter Saint]

Really, Thomad Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, John Lyly and some others were the original Inklings of England and, much like Tolkien, Lewis, and their friends, who drink heavily and talk (er, more brag) about what they were working on. They were probably the first creative writing workshop in history, and a lot of them did fill in to help write someone else's plays.

I actually enjoyed this film. All of the little nods to other plays of the time were very rewarding, and the use of Ben Johnson was brilliant. Personally, I believe that if Marlowe wasn't murdered, it would be his plays we reference to over and over again, but alas he was killed too early in his career. The tragedy of Dr. Faustus is the best play of that era (and, in fact, there is a good evidence that either Shakespeare or Johnson wrote the middle--and actually lesser part--of the play), and the fact that he was able to make Mephistopheles a tragic hero at a time of heightened religious prosecution is simply amazing. There was one theory that, because Marlowe really did get into a lot of trouble, when the oppurtunity arose after Shakespeare was killed in a bar fight, he took Shakespeare's name and let people think that he died instead. After all, plays like Richard III and Hamlet are very close in style to Marlowe's.

What did irritate me in the movie was that they released the plays in the wrong order. One glaring mistake was Macbeth, which Shakespeare had to revise because King James took the throne, and the play as he originally wrote it made the Scots look pretty bad. But oh well, what can you do?

FAUSTUS: And what are you that live with Lucifer?
MEPHISTOPHELES: Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,
Conspir'd against our God with Lucifer,
And are for ever damn'd with Lucifer.
FAUSTUS: Where are you damn'd?
MEPHISTOPHELES: In hell.
FAUSTUS: How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?
MEPHISTOPHELES: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it

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* Why does DeVere need even Ben Jonson as a proxy?
* If Jonson really is such a literary cipher, as DeVere claims, then why has his own play The Alchemist remained so popular when other non-Shakespearean authors have vanished into the Æther?

I think it was that Ben Jonson was much younger at the time, and DeVere actually made the mistake of thinking Jonson couldn't amount to anything on his own. Plus, they needed Jonson as a character because of the introduction he wrote for the collected works of Shakespeare. But DeVere would see him as someone who "has no voice" because his early plays actually sucked. Sejanus (which come on, anus is right in there) would be the box office equivalent of a bomb today, and when his early tragedies failed, he wrote a bunch of comedies all based on Everyman in some form or another. Ironically enough, at this time, Johnson was seen much the same way we look at Roland Emmerich.

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Oh god...I'm having flashbacks to English Lit seminars. Must drink....